Eclectic Technology

Yet research tells us that middle schoolers:

* "are more concerned with content relevance than with credibility."

*  "rarely attend to source features such as author, venue or publication type to evaluate reliability and author perspective.

* "their judgments are often vague, superficial and lack reasoned justification."

What should we do?

1. Teach the Dimensions of Critical Thinking - Relevance, Accuracy, Bias/Perspective and Reliabilty

2. Model and Practice - Use demonstration lessons to focus on the four dimensions above

3. Prompting - Provide written prompts to help guide students; have them cross-check claims through more than one source

4. Help them become healthy skeptics

More information on these factors may be found in the post.